The present invention relates to the electrical, electronic, and computer arts, and more specifically, to thermal management for electronic components.
Conventional computer systems are built of components, such as individual integrated circuits, that are assembled to a printed circuit board known as a backplane or motherboard. Each component consumes electrical power, and dissipates some of that power as waste heat. Waste heat increases the temperature of a computer system, and increasing temperature detracts from reliable operation of the computer system. Accordingly, it is desirable to remove waste heat from the computer system using cooling components such as cold plates. However, different components dissipate different quantities of waste heat; low power components dissipate less heat than high power components. While cold plates are an efficient solution for high power components, they may not be optimal for low power components. For example, cold plates may be suboptimal for low power components because cold plates provide more cooling power than is needed, at a higher cost than is desirable. One factor in the high cost of cold plate cooling is that cold plates must be positioned in close proximity to the components they are meant to cool, and positioning and providing fluid connections to a cold plate for each component is expensive. Air cooling is another option for low power components, but this also may be suboptimal. For example, air cooling may be suboptimal because it requires a fan, which dissipates its own waste heat, or because the customer wishes to save money at the facility level by removing all system heat to evaporatively cooled water.